Even before many of the details were confirmed surrounding yesterday’s tragic events in Austin, political operatives were callously exploiting the incident to advance their agenda in demonizing opponents of big government as terrorists who crash planes into buildings – unfortunately for them it has since emerged that Joe Stack was not a “fringe extremist” and he was not a member of any Tea Party organization.

New York Magazine jumped on the bandwagon, writing that Stack’s rhetoric “could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a tea party rally,” again overwhelmingly implying that anti-tax groups and small government advocates should be silenced because they are dangerous extremists.

“After months of threats on the United States government, and government institutions, the Anti-Government forces known as the teabaggers have struck with their first 911 (sic) inspired terrorist attack,” read the post.

Of course, blaming random acts of violence on the liberty movement has become par for the course for those who wish to crush the free speech of their political adversaries. The University of Alabama-Huntsville murders were also blamed on the Tea Party movement until it turned out that the killer was an Obama-worshipper.

Unfortunately for those who like to exploit tragedies to further their own anti-free speech talking points, it turns out that Stack was not a “teabagger,” he was not a “terrorist,” and he was no Timothy McVeigh, he was a guy pushed to the edge, a sad figure in the mould of Michael Douglas’ character in the movie Falling Down.

Austin Tea Party director Greg Holloway told Newsmax that Stack was not a member of the Austin Tea Party.

“His name does not appear on any of their contact lists, Holloway says. He does not know of any tea party leader who ever met him,” writes David A. Patten.

Asked his reaction to media reports linking the tea party movement to the tragedy, Holloway told Newsmax, “I think it’s just the whole notion of a few people in politics, and I’ll include some of the media, that everything is about political process rather than about people. Here you’ve got a terrible tragedy involving so many people, and the first thought is: ‘How do I use this to forward my own agenda and to try to attack someone else’s?’

National tea party leader Everett Wilkinson also poured cold water on any links to Tea Party groups. “As far as I know, Joseph Andrew Stack was not a member of the tea party movement,” he said. “The movement is not involved in protesting the IRS, but rather government spending. Our best wishes go out to the families and people involved.”

In addition, despite efforts to portray Stack as a political extremist, friends told CBS News that Stack “talked politics like everyone but didn’t show any obsession.”

People who knew Stack said he was an easy going guy, a view backed by Infowars producer Rob Dew, who knew Stack from the Austin music scene and said he was a reserved, soft-spoken, well-dressed man. Dew expressed his shock that Stack could have been capable of flying a plane into a building.

The picture that emerges from all this is not of a violent terrorist hell-bent on destruction to further his paranoid political agenda, as many in the media have attempted to portray, but a man driven to the edge of sanity as a result of his personal disputes with the IRS.

That didn’t stop controlled shill Glenn Beck comparing Stack to Osama Bin Laden and fitting him in to his fairytale delusion about terrorists being within Obama’s inner circle ready to kill the President. Beck even threw the people he claims to represent – Tea Party members – under the bus by saying Stack could be a “radical constitutionalist,” which is how a lot of Tea Party members would describe themselves.

To characterize yesterday’s tragedy as a deadly portend of the “domestic terror” waiting to be unleashed on U.S. cities by disgruntled Americans is not only completely irresponsible, it’s a revelatory insight into how desperate the establishment is – both fake left and right – to neutralize growing peaceful political opposition to the big government agenda across the country.